Back in 2005, Dick Durbin incorrectly characterized our conduct in Gitmo as being out of the Nazi playbook.
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control," he said, "you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings."
As it turns out, and as many right wing blogs pointed out, this was wrong.
More on the flip.
Michelle Malkin popularized a neologism: to Durbinize.
Durbinize, verb.
- To make, either explicitly or implicitly, a moral, political, or factual equivalence between two situations which in reality have little or nothing in common. (After U. S. Senator Richard Durbin (D, ILL) who compared the alleged abusive treatment of a terrorist detainee held at Guantanamo Bay with the depraved horrors of the Nazis, Soviet gulags, and Pol Pot’s mass murders, thereby equating the U. S. personnel with these murderous despots.)
The National Review chipped in their two cents, rightly calling itslander:
Durbin’s words have already been aired by al Jazeera, whose viewership is not known for the dispassionate reason it brings to bear when evaluating the merits of the anti-American slander du jour.
As it turns out, the techniques were were using were NOT Nazi, Cambodian communist or Soviet Communist techniques as Dick Durbin asserted. They were Chinese Communist techniques:
Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described "one form of torture" used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand "for exceedingly long periods," sometimes in conditions of "extreme cold." Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.
The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including "Semi-Starvation," "Exploitation of Wounds," and "Filthy, Infested Surroundings," and with their effects: "Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator," "Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist," and "Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns."
The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."
No apologies are necessary from upstanding patriotic right-wingers like Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, the National Review and others who savaged Dick Durbin for slandering the troops with his allegations.
Dick Durbin regrets the error.